Determining the demographics of a television viewing audience helps television program producers improve their television programming and determine a price for advertising during such programming. In addition, accurate television viewing demographics allows advertisers to target certain types of audiences. To collect the demographics of a television viewing audience, an audience measurement company may enlist a number of television viewers to cooperate in an audience measurement study for a predefined length of time. The viewing behavior of these enlisted viewers, as well as demographic data about these enlisted viewers, is collected and used to statistically determine the demographics of a television viewing audience. In some cases, automatic measurement systems may be supplemented with survey information recorded manually by the viewing audience members.
Audience measurement systems typically require some amount of on-going input from the participating audience member. One method of collecting viewer input involves the use of a people meter. A people meter is an electronic device that is typically disposed in the viewing area and that is proximate to one or more of the viewers. The people meter is adapted to communicate with a television meter disposed in, for example, a set top box, that measures various signals associated with the television for a variety of purposes including, but not limited to, determining the operational status of the television (i.e., whether the television is on or off), and identifying the programming being displayed by the television. Based on any number of triggers, including, for example a channel change or an elapsed period of time, the people meter prompts the household viewers to input information by depressing one of a set of buttons; each of which is assigned to represent a different household member. For example, the people meter may prompt the viewers to register (i.e., log in), or to indicate that they are still present in the viewing audience. Although periodically inputting information in response to a prompt may not be burdensome when required for an hour, a day or even a week or two, some participants find the prompting and data input tasks to be intrusive and annoying over longer periods of time. Thus, audience measurement companies are researching different ways for participants to input information to collect viewing data and provide greater convenience for the participants.
Today, several voice-activated systems are commercially available to perform a variety of tasks including inputting information. For example, users can log in to a computer network by a unique voice command detected by a microphone and authenticated by an algorithm that analyzes the speech signal. In another example, there are home automation appliances that can be turned on and off by voice commands. However, current voice-activated systems are designed to operate in acoustically clean environments. In the case of logging into a computer network, for example, the user speaks directly into a microphone and very little ambient noise is present. In contrast, a major source of interference in an audience measurement system is present in the form of audio output by, for example, speakers of a media presentation device such as a television. If a microphone is built into a people meter, the microphone may pick up pick up significant audio signals from the television speakers that make it difficult to recognize voice commands.